What good is insight…without action?

The prominence of Big Data in recent years across many verticals, not just telecom, has given businesses new insight into complex data sets. But that’s only addressed one part of the problem.

The key question is less “what?” than “what now?”

Because the heart of a telco is the act of deciding how to change the network: what to add to it, when; how to rationalise it, make best use of it, reorganise it.

Today, that’s a job that Artificial Intelligence, with a little help, is uniquely capable of doing.

AI can be used to solve problems that humans don’t know how to solve – or don’t have the time to solve.

Like figuring out whether it makes more sense to scale up a VNF, or use the spare capacity available on a PNF.

Or how to rebuild service chains on the fly when a node is taken down by a DDoS attack.

And rather than try to specify all possible policies for every eventuality, AI can optimize actions against whatever objectives you’re aiming for. Lowest costs? Highest profit margin? Least aggregate power consumption? Determining the best course of action doesn’t end with an insight – it starts with it.

The promise of SDN and NFV is easier and more rapid network change – once you’ve decided what change to make. And since it’s pretty widely acknowledged that we’re likely to have hybrid networks for a long time to come, it is going to be very difficult if the old and the new are operating at completely different speeds.

For some, the technical goal of virtualization is a faster spin around a closed loop. But the business goal is automating the process of turning network capability into revenue and profit. That means scaling the human intelligence that performs that action today, using artificial intelligence capable of handling the speed and scale of our software-defined future.